


Late for Dinner

by myrtlebroadbelt



Series: Four Seasons [4]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Autumn, Family, Gen, Halloween, Hobbits, The Shire, Young Bilbo Baggins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-02 14:20:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13319952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myrtlebroadbelt/pseuds/myrtlebroadbelt
Summary: Bungo shifted the pumpkin in his arms and looked down at the boy in his lopsided wizard’s hat, his beard now dangling around his neck like a fur collar. Although he would never consider parenting a competition, he would be lying if he said he didn’t occasionally worry that Belladonna was winning it anyway.





	Late for Dinner

Belladonna was sick — there were no two ways about it. There were, however, more than two mugs of tea sitting half-finished around Bag End like a breadcrumb trail leading to whatever armchair or sofa she had fallen asleep in. And if Bungo couldn’t find her that way, all he had to do was follow the sneezes.

“Thag you very buch,” Belladonna said through a clogged nose as she reached out from beneath the quilt to accept the bowl of broth Bungo offered. “I do hope this passes before the harvest festival. Autumn is my favorite season.”

“I thought spring was your favorite season,” Bungo recalled, lifting the bed pillows against the headboard so she could sit up straighter — and be less likely to spill.

“It will be, come April,” Belladonna said, and slurped from her spoon. “But as of this moment, all I wish to see are golden leaves and great round pumpkins.”

With that, she drew a sharp breath and shut her eyes in a manner that suggested a sneeze was on its way, prompting Bungo to reach for the bowl in her hands. The sneeze seemed to recede, however, as Belladonna blinked her eyes open and, with a twitch of her nose, returned to slurping. Bungo nevertheless kept a hand near his pocket, ready to produce a handkerchief should it creep up again.

With the back of his other hand, he felt his wife’s forehead. “You’re very warm. I think we should send for the doctor tomorrow.”

“Oh no, please don’t trouble him! I’m sure it’s only a head cold. I’ll be right as rain in a day or two.”

“Better to be safe than sorry,” Bungo told her, as he did of just about everything.

“I’m fine. Really, I am,” she insisted. “I just need a few days of rest, and then I’ll … I’ll …”

The sneeze had returned, and this time it decided to follow through on its threat. Bungo had just enough time to grab the bowl before Belladonna’s thunderous “Achoo!” could jostle it. She may have been small, but her sneezes were as big as a mountain troll’s. (Or, at least, what Bungo imagined of a mountain troll, having thankfully never seen one in the flesh.)

Belladonna accepted her husband’s monogrammed handkerchief with thanks in her eyes, and proceeded to blow her nose into it, just as loudly as she had sneezed. With a wince, Bungo told her to keep it — after all, they were her initials as well.

So caught up were they in sneezes and nose-blowing and bickering about doctors, they didn’t even notice that Bilbo had slipped into the room and climbed onto the bed, where he now sat gently poking his mother’s foot through the quilt.

“Isn’t it past your bedtime, my dear?” Belladonna wondered, and Bungo confirmed, in scolding tones which were not as scary as he liked to believe, that he had tucked the boy in for the night not five minutes before.

“But I haven’t had a story,” Bilbo protested, flopping down on the bed like a petulant fish.

“Well, we can’t have that,” said Belladonna, placing her bowl on the bedside table and pulling the covers aside.

Bungo raised an eyebrow. “And what was all that about a few days of rest?”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” she scoffed, donning her dressing gown as Bilbo teetered with excitement. “One little story never hurt anyone.”

Bungo rolled his eyes fondly and let them go.

Not much later, as he was passing Bilbo’s bedroom on his way to fetch a cup of chamomile for Belladonna’s throat, he paused by the door and heard her in the midst of storytelling. She was describing, between sniffles, a scarecrow so terrifying that it scared away more than just crows.

“One night, a pair of mischievous young hobbits had the idea to sneak onto Farmer Smallburrows’ land and steal a couple of carrots,” Belladonna said. “They laughed at the farmer’s scarecrow, with its pumpkin head and straw hands peeking out from the sleeves of a tattered old coat, and went about stuffing their sacks with vegetables. But when they looked back later, their laughter stopped. Because the scarecrow … was _gone_.” She accented this revelation with a dramatic gasp, as was her habit when telling stories.

Bungo continued to the kitchen, hoping the story wasn’t too frightening for the boy. By the time he returned with the mug, however, the room was quiet. Curious, he rounded the corner, and had to suppress a laugh over what he found — Bilbo, fast asleep beneath the covers, with his mother beside him on top of the quilt, softly snoring.

With an amused shake of his head, Bungo took a blanket from the window seat and draped it over her, blowing out the candle as he left. He drank the chamomile himself, out in the garden as he gathered the most golden of the leaves which had fallen from the oak tree over their hill. The great round pumpkins would have to wait until tomorrow.

 

The next day, despite Belladonna’s protests (accented by coughs) Bungo called for the doctor. She pouted through the exam, then gloated when the doctor repeated, almost verbatim, what she had said the evening before.

“Just a head cold,” he declared, packing up his bag. “A few days of rest, and she’ll be right as rain.”

Bungo hated when Belladonna proved him wrong, but in this case, he would have hated to be right, so he bore her bragging with his mouth shut — when he wasn’t busy fetching tea and stoking the fire.

Unfortunately, Belladonna’s recovery time lasted slightly longer than they’d hoped, and when the day of the harvest festival arrived, she was still sneezing up a storm — and still in denial about it.

“Oh, but I can’t miss it, I never do!” she cried, toweling off her hair after the warm bath Bungo had run for her. “The fresh air will do me good, anyway.”

It was pointless to argue with her, although Bungo tried anyway. He promised to take Bilbo to the festival, and to return with a bouquet of chrysanthemums and the fattest pumpkin he could carry. But she was adamant — if anything, spending a week cooped up in Bag End had made her even more determined to go than if she weren’t so poorly.

So it was decided: The three of them would attend the festival together, and in the evening, as was tradition, Bungo would answer the door to Hobbiton’s children, in their most ghoulish disguises, while Belladonna accompanied Bilbo to fill a basket with treats of his own.

Belladonna dressed in her most autumnal frock, the color of marigolds, with a shawl as brown as cinnamon. She sat herself on the bench by the door, ready to go, while Bungo helped Bilbo into his garb for the day — a pointed hat and floor-length cloak to mimic a wizard’s. More specifically, Gandalf the Grey.

The announcement of his intended guise, on Midsummer’s Eve in the midst of the meddlesome magician’s fireworks display, had dismayed his father and amused his mother, who spent the next several months crafting his costume and deciding on the perfect material for a beard. She settled on raw wool, which tickled Bilbo’s chin — but the rumpled face he made when he wore it somehow only added to the authenticity.

Bungo expected Belladonna to heap praise on their little wizard as they approached the entrance hall. Instead, they found her sound asleep against the cloaks, breathing through her mouth, the basket which was intended for vegetables dangling precariously from her fingers.

“What’s wrong with Mama?” Bilbo asked.

“She needs her rest,” Bungo sighed, tugging gently on his wife’s shawl to wake her up. She did so with a sniffle, and was powerless to resist the support of his arm as he walked her back to the bedroom.

“Don’t forget the chrysanthemums,” she mumbled as he tucked her in. He promised to remember.

The harvest festival market was in Bungo’s wheelhouse. He and Bilbo wandered from cart to cart, buying squash and spiced cakes. Bilbo bobbed for apples with the other Hobbiton children and had sunflowers painted on his cheeks.

They ran into Grandpa Mungo, who made sure to comment privately to Bungo that the buttons on his grandson’s waistcoat were not properly aligned. Several Tooks were also gathered by the pumpkin patch, sipping mulled wine and singing songs. Bilbo’s Aunt Mirabella was among them, and she wondered where her sister was.

“So much for the intrepid adventurer,” she laughed when Bungo informed her of Belladonna’s illness. “Well, I suppose I should keep her company.”

Bungo handed her the chrysanthemums vegetable basket to deliver to Bag End, and allowed Bilbo to tug him toward the apple cider stand. The day had been without incident, which was unsurprising. Market days were always Bungo’s favorite, whether it was festival season or not.

When it came to trick-or-treating, however, Bungo was a bit out of his depth.

He was glad the tradition had changed since he was a boy, and was now more focused on the treats than the tricks. He would never forget the year he was pressured by his friends to throw flour in the face of Hobbiton’s most notorious grump — that is, aside from his own father, who sent him to bed without sweets for an entire month as soon as he found out. (It didn’t take much investigation, as Bungo ran straight home before the grump had even wiped the flour from his eyes, and admitted the entire thing.)

There still was, of course, the occasional trick — just last year, Bungo woke to discover egg splattered across the parlor window — but Bilbo certainly didn’t partake in anything of the sort, and the entire business had become much more wholesome. Still, Bungo was far more comfortable answering the door with cakes and biscuits in hand than he was traipsing through Hobbiton after dark with a sugared-up fauntling. He and Belladonna had an annual arrangement, and it suited them just fine. Alas, that cold of hers had rather dreadful timing.

They had filled up on market food and taken tea at Grandpa Mungo’s, but Bungo was still adamant that they be home in time for dinner, and made Bilbo promise to save most of his treats for later. The boy agreed, despite the obvious pout behind his woolly beard.

After weaving through crowds of ghosts and goblins, fairies and flowers — with Bilbo’s own costume receiving mixed reactions from Hobbiton’s residents, depending on their opinion of the wizard who inspired it — Bungo decided it was time to return to Bag End. Not only was he anxious to check on Belladonna, but he had decided that the pumpkin he was currently cradling would make an excellent soup, and was craving it as much as Bilbo craved the lemon cakes currently burning a hole in his basket.

Bungo had just opened his mouth to declare that the evening was over, when Bilbo cut in with a declaration of his own: “Look, Papa! The maze!”

“Maze?” Bungo echoed, and followed the direction of Bilbo’s wobbly finger to discover a wooden sign that announced the very word. It stood beside a wall of wheat, where Farmer Smallburrows’ land began. A smattering of hobbits filed through a single opening between the tall stalks, the parents carrying lanterns to light the way for fidgety children.

Bungo steeled himself for Bilbo’s disappointment. “I’m afraid we don’t have time for that tonight, my boy. We don’t want your mother to worry.”

“But Mama always takes me!” Bilbo objected. “We can’t miss it!”

Bungo shifted the pumpkin in his arms and looked down at the boy in his lopsided wizard’s hat, his beard now dangling around his neck like a fur collar. Although he would never consider parenting a competition, he would be lying if he said he didn’t occasionally worry that Belladonna was winning it anyway.

He looked at the maze, and he thought longingly of soup, and he sighed. “Very well. Let’s have a look, shall we?”

Bilbo buzzed with excitement as they approached Farmer Smallburrows at the maze’s entrance. “Nice to see you out this year, Mister Bungo,” the rosy-cheeked hobbit said as he handed him a lantern. Bungo forced a smile, even as he began to overthink the implications of his apparently noticeable absence.

He was soon distracted by another train of thought, as, immediately upon entering the maze, he remembered how much he disliked them. It had been many years since he had last attempted one, and, when faced with the decision of turning left or right, he was reminded of the anxiety it caused him as a tween.

“Let’s go this way, Papa,” Bilbo decided, tugging him by the hand to the left.

He supposed there was no more informed decision to be made, and so he allowed himself to be dragged along the boy’s route, hoping that perhaps the maze hadn’t changed from last year, and Bilbo was going from memory.

That quickly turned out not to be the case. They reached dead end after dead end, and scooted past hobbits moving in both directions, who looked just as confused (if slightly more relaxed) as they did. Bungo felt terribly trapped, and the whole ordeal was made even worse by the scarecrows.

They appeared at various points throughout the maze, smiling down at them with their stitched mouths reaching out their handless arms. They eventually proved mildly helpful for navigation, as Bungo began to see the same scarecrows more than once, and realized they were doubling back on themselves. Still, he would have vastly preferred them not to be there.

He’d been unsettled by scarecrows since his youth, but if he was being honest, it was Belladonna’s overheard story from the other night which put the current knot in his stomach. Although he had never heard the ending, due to her sudden slumber, and, even before that, his shameful hurry to get away from the door, his mind was currently inventing a few of its own, and none of them turned out well for the pair of mischievous hobbits.

“Papa, will we ever find our way out?” Bilbo said as they took yet another wrong turn. The tremble of worry in the boy’s voice told Bungo that this was taking longer than it did when Belladonna was in charge, which only led to more panic on his part.

“Of course we will. Don’t be silly.” He was telling himself as much as Bilbo, and he adjusted the pumpkin in his tired arms — one of which also held the lantern — as he considered their next move.

 _Pull yourself together_ , he told himself, puffing up his chest. _Your son is counting on you._

He looked up at the night sky, trying to remember where the moon was when they entered — indeed, where it usually was this time of night, and if it even mattered. When this method proved unsuccessful, he stood on the tips of his toes in an attempt to see over the tops of the stalks. He could just make out the highest hills of Hobbiton in the distance, dark and swollen against an inky blue background.

He spun around, struggling to find a landmark, anything he recognized. It all proved rather monotonous, until he spotted a familiar silhouette off to their left — an oak tree, majestic and lonely atop a hill.

“Bag End!” he cried, a bit more loudly than he intended. “It’s over that way. And we came in on that side. Perhaps we can find our way back.”

“No, Papa, we’re supposed to get to the other side,” Bilbo argued.

Oh. Yes. That was the point, wasn’t it? Yet Bungo’s mind was fixated more on getting home than finishing any sort of challenge. He felt helpless, not wanting to disappoint the boy, but not wanting to spend the night — which had become quite chilly — in the middle of a field with a pumpkin for a pillow.

Fortunately (although he didn’t see it as such at the time), Bungo didn’t have to make a decision — the scarecrow made it for him. It appeared, not out of the corner of his eye, like a stray hair one mistakes for an insect, but rather at a galloping pace, bursting forth from the shadowy wheat stalks in front of him, with straw for hair and a maniacal grin — his waking nightmares brought to life.

Bungo didn’t have time to consider how absurd it was that a living scarecrow was currently lunging towards him. He was too busy dropping his pumpkin with a shout, just barely avoiding a broken toe. Rather miraculously, he had the presence of mind not to drop the lantern as well.

In one fell swoop, he used his newly freed arm to scoop Bilbo off the ground, tossed him over his shoulder, and start running. Bungo had never been what one would describe as athletic. However, given just the right threat, a metamorphosis apparently occurred, and he could have scaled a mountain with his son on his back if the occasion called for it.

“What are we doing?” Bilbo asked as his father ran, taking random turns. He sounded unusually calm — was he giggling? — but Bungo was too focused on the hurried footsteps behind him to pay much attention.

For a moment, desperation seemed to be exactly what he needed to find his way out of this labyrinth, as he turned down row after row, careening past confused hobbits and kicking dirt up with every step, and found not a single dead end in the bunch. That is, until he did.

He whipped around, his back against the stalks, holding the lantern at arm’s length as if it were a weapon — or at least a helpful way of seeing what was about to attack him. Bilbo tugged at his jacket and asked why they had stopped, and yes, Bungo confirmed, those were giggles. The poor boy must not have seen their assailant, for which he was grateful, as he braced for whatever monstrosity he was about to face.

It should be mentioned that this entire ordeal, from the scarecrow’s first appearance to this very moment, as it came wheeling around the corner toward them, occurred in the space of one minute. This would explain why Bungo, in his haste to save himself and his child, failed to notice one quite important detail — namely that, as you may have guessed by now, he wasn’t running from a scarecrow at all.

“Ivy, where have you been? I’ve been looking everywhere!” said the hobbit woman who approached the young girl currently giggling at the end of the row, her mouth painted into a scarecrow’s smile. The mother straightened her daughter’s cloth hat, which covered a crown of messy straw over orange-red curls. It was then that she noticed Bungo there, panting like a madman. “Oh, I hope she hasn’t been bothering you. She thinks she’s quite terrifying.”

The mother laughed. Bungo blinked.

“Are having trouble finding your way out?” she asked. “I’ve just discovered it while I was looking for this little rascal, if you’d like me to show you.”

Bungo opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out, so he nodded instead, and followed the woman as she guided her scarecrow daughter by the hand. The sight of a world beyond the wheat, when he glimpsed it, nearly made him cry with relief. “END,” announced a painted sign, around which groups of hobbits stood loitering, waiting for their friends to find their way out, or guessing how long it took them compared to last year.

Bilbo squirmed into a more comfortable position in Bungo’s arms, placing a hand on his father’s chest to steady himself. “Papa, your heart is fast,” he said. “Are you scared?”

Bungo could have lied. He could have concocted some excuse about hurrying home for dinner, or playing a game. He could have said that he was never scared, that grown hobbits shouldn’t be. He thought about it, and he thought about his own childhood, and how his heart pounded when he threw that flour in the old grump’s face, and how it beat even harder when he confessed it.

And so he chose instead to set Bilbo on the ground, straighten his wizard’s hat — which had held on through the preceding events only by the strength of the ribbon Belladonna had attached — and tell him the truth.

“Yes, I was scared.” He knelt down to look him in the eye. “Sometimes even papas get scared. And do you know what else? It’s quite all right for you to be scared, too.”

“I wasn’t scared,” Bilbo said matter-of-factly.

Bungo was trying very hard to put his parenting before his pride. “Yes, well, that’s good to hear. But I was speaking more generally.” He patted the boy on the head and stood up, before thinking to ask, "Did you ... have fun?"

The boy nodded, and Bungo felt very pleased with himself. "Will you pick me up again?" Bilbo asked then, holding out his arms.

Bungo rubbed at his shoulder. "Er, perhaps tomorrow, my boy."

 _Not a competition_ , he repeated to himself as they turned to leave. Still, he was glad to have earned a few points.

He was even more glad to find a series of signs pointing the way back to the road, and returned to Bag End ready to fill his stomach — sad as he was that the promise of pumpkin soup currently lay on the ground somewhere in the midst of a maze he had no intention of returning to. But no matter, squash soup would suffice.

When they entered the house, they found Belladonna and her sister laughing like tweens at the kitchen table over tea and leftover sweets. Some combination of it all seemed to have improved Belladonna’s state, although she still sounded slightly drowned when she spoke, and wiped her nose with a handkerchief.

“You’re late for dinner,” she said teasingly when the two of them walked in, before glancing down at Bungo’s empty hands and adopting a more serious expression. “Where’s my pumpkin?”

Points or no points, he decided then and there that she was never allowed to be ill again.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm about two months late on this, but it's never a bad time for a little autumn in the Shire, am I right? I'm just going to assume the hobbits celebrate some form of Halloween, because it would make me very sad if they didn't.
> 
> P.S. If you caught the "Meet Me in St. Louis" reference, we'll be friends forever.
> 
> Thanks for reading! I'm on [Tumblr](http://myrtlebroadbelt.tumblr.com/).


End file.
